India generates roughly 1.5 million tonnes of end-of-life tyres a year, and the formal sector recycles only about 450,000 tonnes of it — under a third. The other two-thirds gets dumped, stockpiled, or burned informally. Crumb-rubber-modified bitumen is one of the few uses for that waste stream with a real, standards-backed, government-anchored market already forming around it.
What crumb rubber actually does to bitumen
Crumb rubber is waste tyre rubber ground into uniform granular particles (roughly 400 microns to a few millimetres, depending on the grinding method — ambient, cryogenic, wet-grind, or high-pressure hydro-jet), with the steel and fibre reinforcement separated out. Blended into hot bitumen — the “wet process,” preferred over dry-process blending for Indian conditions — it measurably changes the binder’s properties. Lab testing at India’s SSPACE Wardha civil engineering department, reported in a 2025 study, found the following as crumb-rubber content increased from 0% to 14% by weight:
| Crumb rubber content, % | Penetration value (mm) | Softening point (°C) |
|---|---|---|
| 0 | not reported | 42.75 |
| 5 | 69 | 50.3 |
| 9 | 49.33 | 51.65 |
| 13 | 19.67 | 54.5 |
| 14 | 14.33 | 55.0 |
Lower penetration value means a harder binder grade — more structural strength and less water damage. Higher softening point means the road surface resists rutting and shoving better in hot weather. Both trends move in the direction road engineers want, at the cost of a harder, more viscous mix that costs more to produce than plain bitumen.
The bitumen import bill CRMB is quietly offsetting
Crumb rubber doesn't just dispose of tyre waste — it displaces a share of a fossil input India imports at real scale. Petroleum bitumen (HSN 2713, 8-digit ITC-HS code 27132000) is one of India's structurally import-dependent construction materials: national consumption reached roughly 8.8 million tonnes in FY2023-24 and was projected near 10 million tonnes in FY2024-25 (+14% year-on-year), driven by NHAI's national-highway pipeline and state road programmes. Roughly 40-50% of that demand is met through imports, at an annual cost of about ₹25,000–30,000 crore — roughly $3.0–3.6 billion at FY24 exchange rates (the rupee figure is the sourced number), itself an 8% year-on-year rise. Iraq, the UAE and Iran together account for about 86% of India's HSN 2713 import volumes, concentrating the supply chain in a handful of Gulf and West Asian sources.
| Detail | Figure |
|---|---|
| HSN heading | 2713 — petroleum coke, petroleum bitumen & other residues of petroleum oils |
| ITC-HS 8-digit code | 27132000 — petroleum bitumen specifically |
| National consumption, FY2023-24 | ~8.8 million tonnes |
| Projected consumption, FY2024-25 | ~10 million tonnes (+14% YoY) |
| Import share of demand | ~40–50% |
| Annual import cost | ₹25,000–30,000 crore (~$3.0–3.6bn at FY24 rates, +8% YoY) |
| Top import sources | Iraq, UAE, Iran (~86% combined share) |
CRMB doesn't eliminate this dependency — the lab data in the previous section shows crumb rubber typically substitutes at 5-14% of binder content, not a wholesale bitumen replacement. But at India's road-construction volumes, even a single-digit percentage substitution across the CRMB-eligible network share represents a real, quantifiable dent in a multi-billion-dollar import bill concentrated in three countries.
The standards already exist
This isn’t an unproven idea waiting on regulation — India has had a specification framework for over two decades. IS 15462:2004 (Bureau of Indian Standards) specifies polymer and rubber modified bitumen; IRC:SP:53, first issued in 1999 and revised in 2010, gives Indian Roads Congress guidelines for using it in construction; IRC:SP:107-2015 covers gap-graded wearing courses specifically for rubberised bitumen. NHAI has pushed rubberised bitumen on high-traffic corridors, with trial sections in Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu, and NRRDA has folded crumb rubber into its rural-road specifications.
Who is actually doing this
One of Asia’s largest end-of-life-tyre recyclers, manufacturing Crumb Rubber Modifier (CRM), CRM Bitumen (CRMB) and Polymer Modified Bitumen (PMB) from plants in Panipat (Haryana), Wada & Varle (Maharashtra), Haldia (West Bengal) and Gummidipundi (Tamil Nadu). Revenue was around ₹572 crore in the most recent reported year. In FY2026 the company won a two-year, ₹75.79 crore contract from Indian Oil Corporation to supply CRM for CRMB plants at Haldia and Mathura — a real, priced, government-linked offtake contract, not a pilot.
Operating a 300-tonne micro tyre-recycling site in Alwar, Rajasthan, converting scrap tyres into crumb rubber for CRMB and other applications, with a franchisee rollout plan targeting 11 sites nationally — Ahmedabad (Gujarat) is the next site after Alwar. A smaller, more distributed model than Tinna’s integrated plants, betting on collection-point density rather than scale per plant.
The EPR mechanism paying for it
Since July 2022, waste tyres have been covered under Extended Producer Responsibility through an amendment to the Hazardous and Other Wastes (Management and Transboundary Movement) Rules, adding tyres to Schedule IX. Producers, importers, recyclers and retreaders must register on the CPCB’s dedicated EPR portal and meet annual recycling obligations calculated against their own tyre production or imports two years prior. The targets ramp up fast: 35% of 2020-21 production/imports in 2022-23, 70% in 2023-24, and 100% of the volume from two years prior, from 2024-25 onward.
Producers meet their obligation by buying EPR certificates from registered recyclers through the CPCB portal — recyclers earn a certificate for every tonne of waste tyre they process, and sell it to a producer who needs to hit their target. This isn’t theoretical: Tinna Rubber reported ₹23.9 crore in EPR-credit revenue in just the first nine months of FY2026, on top of its regular CRM/CRMB sales — a second, policy-created revenue stream layered on top of the physical product business.
Why this matters beyond roads
A tyre is roughly 70% recoverable rubber by weight once steel and fibre are stripped out. At India’s current ~1.5 million tonnes of annual waste-tyre generation, the roughly 1 million tonnes still going to dumping, stockpiling or informal (often unsafe) pyrolysis represents both an environmental liability — stockpiled tyres are fire hazards and mosquito-breeding sites — and a large, standards-ready, policy-subsidised input that road construction is only beginning to absorb at scale. The 100%-of-production EPR target now in force from 2024-25 is the clearest signal yet that this shifts from a niche technical option to a mainstream compliance-driven material stream.
Sources: L. K. Kokate & R. M. Damgir, "Sustainable Road Construction in India: A State-of-the-Art Assessment of Waste Tyre Rubber Modified Bitumen," IOSR-JMCE, Jul–Aug 2024; Shweta N. Rokade et al., IJAITE, 2025 (lab test data); Bureau of Indian Standards (IS 15462:2004), Indian Roads Congress (IRC:SP:53, IRC:SP:107-2015); CPCB Waste Tyre EPR Portal and the Hazardous and Other Wastes (Management and Transboundary Movement) Amendment Rules, 2022; company disclosures (Tinna Rubber & Infrastructure Ltd, Regrip). Company financials current as of FY2026 reporting; verify against the latest filings before relying on them for any decision.
Tyres are one of several material streams India now runs an EPR-certificate market for — on the same mechanism applied to PET plastic, used oil and batteries, see PET Recycling Already Cuts Emissions 60%+, which traces the pattern common to all of them: an already-working (often informal) collection and reprocessing system that policy is now certifying and scaling rather than building from nothing.
About this article: Researched, written and edited by Umashankar Triplicane Dwarakanathan, with AI research assistance; every figure is meant to trace to the primary source cited. See the Editorial Policy for how sourcing, AI use and corrections work.
